By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel Page A

suspended sentence, you might say.
    My movements betray rheumatism, but they still have a mind of their own. They want to make me go round in circles, like a donkey tied to his millstone, grinding the last grain. To lead me back to feeling. It’s their fault I found myself on the bank of the little canal, which traced, in the whiteness, a green net trimmed with melting stars. As I sank into the snow, I thought of Napoleon’s bloody retreat across the Berezina River: an epic. Maybe that’s what I need to persuade myself there really is some meaning to life, that for all my feeling lost I’m headed in the right direction, straight into the history books, for centuries to come; that maybe Fate had a plan in causing me to postpone my departure so many times, the barrel of Gachentard’s rifle pulled away fast at the last moment, not slowly as I had slipped it down my throat, on mornings when I awoke to feeling like a dried-out well. The taste of a rifle—what an odd thing! The prickling in your tongue when it’s peeled off the freezing barrel. The flavors, like wine, pale rocks.
    Some stone martens had fought a skirmish here. Their clawstudded paws had left calligraphies, arabesques, a madman’s testimony on the snow. Their bellies left molds and described shallow paths that diverged and then crossed, melting into each other, and then diverged again before stopping short, as though suddenly, at the end of their little battle, both animals had taken flight.
    “So old and so fucking dumb . . .”
    I thought the cold was playing tricks on me.
    “You want to catch your death?” the voice continued, coming as though from afar, all raspy consonants, clinking medals. No need to turn around. It was Joséphine Maulpas. Born the same year I was, in the same village too. Moved here when she was thirteen years old and went to work as an all-purpose maid. She kept it up till she was twenty, passing from one well-to-do family to another as she cultivated a taste for the bottle, bit by bit—until there was not another family that would have her. Thrown out, chucked, rejected, done for. To survive, she took up the stinking trade of selling animal skins: rabbits, moles, weasels, ferrets, foxes, all sorts, dangling by her side still bloody, freshly stripped with a pocketknife. Thirty years and more of trundling her goitrous cart through the streets, bleating out monotonously, “Rabbit skins! Animal skins! Rabbit skins!” Most people simply stopped hearing her after a time, as she took on the butchery scent of her carcasses and, before long, their appearance too—their purple complexion, their leaden eyes—she who once had been a real beauty.
    For a few coins, Joséphine—dubbed the Skin by the kids in town—sold her prizes to Elphège Crochemort, who tanned them in an abandoned mill on the banks of the Guérlante, six kilometers upstream from us. Half in ruins, the old mill took on water like a big open ship; but it remained standing all the same, season after season.
    Crochemort rarely came to town, but when he did you could follow his trail. You could easily tell which street he’d gone down, his stench was so awful, regardless of season or time of day, as if he himself had soaked in those alkali vats. Notwithstanding, he was a tall, rather handsome man, with swept-back shiny black hair and lively eyes of a beautiful azure blue. A very handsome man indeed, and quite alone. I always saw him as one of the perpetually condemned, like the ones they say existed among the Greeks, forever rolling their boulders uphill or getting their livers eaten. Had Crochemort done something awful that haunted him? Maybe he was making himself pay for it by wreaking solitude, for if he’d only been rubbed with lavender and jasmine, he’d have had all the women at his feet.
    Joséphine took him her booty every week. She’d long since been indifferent to the odors and—even before she took up her trade—to men as well. But Elphège Crochemort